D4 has joined forces with DKPM, one of Yorkshire’s most respected brand communications agencies, to offer a broader, more comprehensive and reinvigorated service for our clients.

The new venture combines our extensive web development and new media expertise with the vast experience DKPM has in advertising and branding. Having long respected each other’s work we are delighted now to be formally merging our businesses, enabling us to improve and extend our service offering to all our valued clients.

It’s business as usual, but better…

As of Monday 25 January 2010 the whole D4 team has become part of DKPM, which is great news for our clients. Our philosophy and approach to work will remain unchanged, and we will continue to be based here at The Stock Building so you will enjoy complete continuity of service. What will change is the range of services and expertise we can offer; this will expand dramatically.

Our new colleagues are a fantastic and experienced group of people with a huge range of new and fresh ideas to bring to the table. And greater internal resources will bring exciting new possibilities. DKPM’s impressive portfolio of regional, national and multi-national clients includes Sega, BAFTA, Disney Interactive, moneysupermarket.com, Sony Computer Entertainment, Westfield Health and Servisair.

As Head of Digital I am now part of the DKPM senior management team, and I look forward to introducing you to our new colleagues, including our Managing Director Paul Martin. We will be glad to answer any questions you may have about the changes.

Thanks for your continued support, and I look forward to working with you again in the near future.

Yours sincerely

Paul Herron

We’re all for reducing our carbon footprint so we were glad to start work with a new solar panel company in the region, to help them get their brand message out there…

We’ll say more about them soon, but for now we thought we’d share some of the gorgeous illustrations made by our Matt for the company’s literature.

The idea was to tell a simple story about how solar energy can be harnessed by ordinary householders to run their homes. We wanted to show that, as well as helping reduce CO2 emissions, solar panels can save people cash and even earn them a bit extra in return for producing clean energy.

We’re creating a whole new brand strategy for the company, and producing a brochure and web design, which we’ll shout about when they’re launched. In the meantime, enjoy the pretty pictures…

Without attempting to sound like a host from Family Fortunes, “If you were to ask 100 people from South Yorkshire what made them proud of their region?” I’d happily guess that a majority of them would have an answer based around a strong, industrial heritage (either that or The Full Monty!).

Being a Sheffield based company therefore, we at D4 are no different in sharing this viewpoint and consider it a great opportunity to work on a re-branding project with Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust, who specialise in preserving and promoting this traditional culture.

When considering how to move forward with the brand strategy, we wanted the Trust and museum gems to be more accurately presented online and to make the website a more enjoyable experience to help convey the importance of giving museum’s an overhaul. The starting point for this project though was to give the Trust a whole new ‘brand architecture’ that could be rolled out across all future marketing and promotional material. As the Trust currently manages three industrial museums (Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet; Shepherd Wheel Workshop; Kelham Island Museum), it was important to have a design that was recognisable not only across each sub-sector, but also represented the group as a whole.

With the brand imagery decided upon, the next step was to update and modernise the Trusts website. The main principle of the new website would be to act as a more effective marketing tool attracting new visitors to the museums which we did through colourful image led graphics all powered by impressive backend functionality of a database driven website. Allowing the site to be database driven means the sites content can be managed in-house, allowing for any instant updates on events and collections as and when they happen. With the foundations of the website in place, we also brought it bang up-to-date with social media feeds, a blog and a newsletter link, all great ways to keep young viewers updated.

We didn’t just stop with logo designs and a new web design, we also helped roll out the new brand across a range of promotional literature for various events and an educational campaign to schools in the region.

Sheffield Industrial Museums Trust are very good at modernising history without removing the sense of education and traditional values attached to it….. now they have a website and brand to match…

WEBSITE BEFORE:

WEBSITE AFTER:

BRANDING:

EDUCATION LITERATURE:

We’ve been enjoying ourselves with one project inparticular recently after we were handed the challenge of designing a new brand strategy for online social invitations company, Überfly. We were also let loose on designing 10 invites that would be sold on their soon to be launched web-to-print website.

Our first step was to analyse Überfly’s offering, its rivals and discuss how we could make Überfly’s invitations more imaginative and individual. We soon realised that most of their competitors websites were quite dated and as a result, sometimes cheap and tacky looking. We wanted to design a brand, associated images and a website that would establish Überfly as a well priced company with exceptional, contemporary design at its heart.

Having created a series of images that would cover all genres of invitations, ranging from children’s parties through to corporate events, the team decided to get particularly creative on the brands logo. Fonts were tweaked, pictures were stretched and pulled, and plenty of coffee was drunk to ensure the final designs were of the highest standard. Creative thinking produced a logo that resembled the the back of an ‘open’ envelope, and the eagle-eyed amongst you may also notice that the typography in the logo has also been adjusted to match the same two types of curved contours at the top and bottom of the envelope shape. It’s what we pride ourselves on - attention to detail and it is how we believe graphic design should be. We could have just plonked a sans serif font in there and saved a bit of time, but we believe these small tweaks make a big difference. Our client also appreciated the effort we put in and feel ‘chuffed’ that they have a unique brand and their very own font.

While we’re at it, here’s a sneak preview of the website and some of the invites we designed. As I’m sure you’ll agree from the graphics below the designs of the invites look………..Über!!

The graphic below will be sold under the ‘Party’ category. Our brief from the client was simply ‘Glamour!’ - now that’s what we call an open brief. So we did some thinking, stared out of the window and then used Angela (graphic design student & D4 tea lady for a fortnight) as our muse. We took a few shots of Angela in the studio and then produced this lovely vector illustration. Client was happy and so were we.

Here’s a few more invites for your viewing pleasure…

It seems rare these days to find a good, old fashioned, British engineering firm that delivers on the talent and craftsmanship that originally made South Yorkshire the engineering hub of the UK. It’s with great privilege therefore, that D4 have been able to link up again with a true, great British engineering firm in the stature of Philford Design.

Prior to us starting work with them two years ago, Philford’s had no marketing literature for their previous 29 years of existence! They were certainly doing something right though, as they had built up, and still maintain an envious reputation within the mining industry. Commissioned to look at their brand communications, D4 helped roll out their new style of corporate literature, website and promotional materials, to help aide introduction into a wider market.

Having established their brand and reputation within the UK engineering market, and winning new business as a result of the brand strategy we delivered. Philford’s approached us once again to ask if we could help them take the next step into embracing the overseas markets. Happy to help, the first step we looked at for integration into a foreign market was to update and upgrade the existing Philford’s website to be more internationally friendly. This was done by making it database driven (Baffled!? see the following link and all will be explained…….). Updating their website to a database allows Philford’s to content manage all areas of the business with greater ease, as well as enabling language capabilities to help conquer a wide range of international markets such as the Czech Republic and Poland.

With minor copy and translations to finish we expect the ‘new and improved’ website to be up live in the next few weeks!

Success!! It was slaps on the back all round in the D4 studio recently as we proudly fought off the competition, battling it out in a three way pitch to deservedly win the brand re-development rights for North Lincolnshire based Pink Pig Farm. The excitement surrounding this project was further increased as it was the first pitch we had won (at our first attempt) under the new government initiative ‘Designing Demand’. The success of winning this Design Council based project will hopefully be the first of many for the D4 team.

To assess how we would be able to help Pink Pig, we sent along decisive duo, Clare and Marianne who put on there wellies and flat caps for a day on the farm. Leaving no question unanswered and no stone unturned, they analysed everything from the farmyard itself, right through to the shop and restaurant. After careful consideration, it was soon decided that the best way to help move things forward effectively, would be to embrace the Pink Pig brand as a whole.

The first step on this road to re-developing PInk Pig, was to consolidate their service / product offering, defining ‘who they are and what they stand for’. We decided their point of difference was an honest, family run, working farm - “it’s all about the pigs” as Paul put it. Once we’d developed an identity they loved, it was just a case of getting it rolled out across the business. With work firmly underway on the website (and the new designs looking great by the way!), we also set about improving the communications aimed at customers across the shop, cafe and farm trail. This has included re-designing the shop layout, introducing special offers and creating intriguing ‘did you know?’ facts about the Pink Pig.

Exciting times lie ahead for Pink Pig and D4 with the new development hoping to be launched by the end of September. It certainly seems like the futures bright……the futures pink!

So we’re in the middle of this great branding and design project for a new business start up in Sheffield… and (woohoo!) they produce ice cream. Without wishing to sound like an M&S advert, this is no ordinary ice cream, this is ice cream inspired by flavours and ingredients from the Far East, including black sesame, lychee, ginger and green tea.

This new brand on the ‘foodie’ block is called Yee Kwan Handcrafted Ice Cream & Sorbet, and it was set up specifically to improve the ‘dessert experience’ in Chinese, Thai and Japanese restaurants, which up until now has been pretty limited. Once Yee Kwan told us we had been selected ahead of other design agencies in Sheffield there was only one thing on our minds… SAMPLES. Take it from us, the product is excellent; we’re big fans and delighted to be involved with something so close to our hearts – FOOD!

Post sample tasting it was all hands on deck to ensure a working version of the brand was ready for the launch day at Sheffield’s ‘BiG: Make it Your Business’ event that took place on Fargate in Sheffield city centre and was opened by Leader  of Sheffield City Council Paul Scriven.

The brand we developed for this delicious ice cream and sorbet did the trick it seemed; when we went cruising by on the Saturday (err looking for more samples) the lemongrass and lime flavour had sold out.

We’re now on with the final packaging design and the website design and development. But for now here are some visual snippets of our graphic design work and a few images from the day…

Well who’d have thought it, a D4 representative lecturing 35 masters marketing students on online branding?! Clare Williams went in by request of Daragh O’Reilly, Head of Marketing at Sheffield University, to give students an insight into the working world of marketing & branding for online audiences.

We covered topics such as; an introduction to online branding, the creative process, understanding brands, translating values into functionality, target audience demographics, wireframes, results & reporting, email & viral marketing, microsites, online communities, SEO, ageing websites and gave numerous case studies relating back to the specific topics.

The presentation helped to back up eight weeks of theory provided by Daragh who himself is a marketing guru, with an extensive practical background as well as many published papers under his belt. So it really was an honour to be asked by such an inspirational figure.

Despite having done squillions of presentations to boards of directors, business owners and marketing managers, Clare was surprised to find that prior to the lecture her legs had gone slightly jelly like and she had the glare of a piece of glass. However she later admitted this was largely due to forgetting her wonder woman suit.

The presentation was warmly received and Clare was extremely relieved that no-one fell asleep, at least noticeably. In fact Clare has been asked back to lecture 120 in the autumn of 2009. If anyone can find her can they please let her know.

…and I’m not talking about the kind that happens at the staff christmas do or when you are trying to reach the chocolate mikado sticks from the top shelf and accidently photocopy your intimates, but the genuine kind that causes distress and pain.

D4 have been commissioned to do the re-brand of Accident Solicitors Direct, including their website with a content managed system geared towards some serious data capture, shopfront signage, stationery, literature and a full-scale marketing plan. We have given them a fresh, contemporary look which we are currently implementing on their website and in all their marketing materials. The next step is working in conjunction with an SEO campaign to increase their case loads and geographical reach.

Having seen their client testimonials we can honestly say people sing their praises. Often people are mis-advised in this area and don’t see the full amount of their claim, but one client said he didn’t believe he would get the full compensation until he was holding the cheque in his hand and was impressed by the speed, efficiency and personal service. Now we’ve given them a more up to date image to reflect this and at ASD they cannot wait to reveal their new image in all it’s glory.

There is also a photoshoot and video to come, more will be revealed but for now here’s a little sneak preview…

Yorkshire puddings, The Human League, Bobby Knut… all things we love about South Yorkshire. Now gorgeous curves can be added to the list…

Thinbelina - a small, independent business based in Maltby - are experts in bespoke, handmade corsetry and D4 has just finished their branding, design and website. Keep checking the D4 site for much more to come from Thinbelina, including a rather tasty postcard set we are currently working on. Speaking of tasty, The Drum magazine definintely thought so: www.thedrum.co.uk

Have a peek at the site and spread the word about an up and coming local brand. Full details of the project will be showcased on our website soon…

www.thinbelina.co.uk